The Sims 3 Review
So I bought a new laptop with my savings to play the sims 3. ridiculous, i know, but i am a hardcore gamer annnnnd a hardcore The Sims fan.
Anywho, here is my review of TS3. It is long, so bear with me.
Review:
The Sims gives you little people that you can design. It sets up a virtual, customizable life. Probably, your little person looks like you. You build your people homes, choose their furniture, buy them better TV's when the cash flows, watch them go to work, strategize their romances, educate their children, and lament their deaths. The Sims is a cut above other virtual life games for two simple reasons: control and complexity. Here is an example and a simple truth: It is more fun to spend money making your home ten feet wider; decorating every inch, than it is to level up into upper middle class and have a better house materialize before you (as with Sim City). Control. Complexity. Secondarily: realism and ease. Very lastly: ergonomics. We go wow when we can make a fifth floor and an elevator. We do not go wow when a family inventory button is added to the buy menu.
Why is this game fun? Fun is a sense of progress related to applied skill. YOUR skill. If a big red button appeared with the text "Win Game" and all you had to do was push it, that wouldn't be too awesome, would it? Fifty thousand years ago we were spearing mammoth and splitting stone. Today, hustling to press a stack of papers into your boss's paws typifies the real-world dynamic of progress. There is no sense of it, because there is no end in sight. With the Sims, promotions are possible, romances can be with anyone, and your home can be whatever you want it to be. The horizon is visible, and its breadth depends observably on your efforts. Fun is work; it's just work that involves all of you, as a person, and it is work that has rewards in sight. With many options and reasonable rewards, the Sims lulls you to work your happy little butt off.
A sequel to such a franchise needs to challenge and subvert the original limitations. It needs to offer more options, better control, increased flexibility, improved realism, and if there's time: make it easier to use. But ease is really the least of all considerations. EA made that mistake with Spore.
We expected a sequel. We expected advances, amelioration, aesthetics, and many other A-words often emergent on the SAT. But now we're eyeing the gunfire back from the community, members of which reported their disgust with this new incarnation. They were quick to note the evaporation of Maxis over the corporate burners of EA, a company for whom public appraisal often reserves just one very special A-word.
So IS The Sims 3 a fitting sequel (or was it a prequel) ? Did they fail? Is this a creative vision, or a "duct-tape it and pass it down the assembly line" product, fit for today's marketplace? Well, it's both. It has the range, but not the depth. It has surface variety on its structure, but you can't go inside the
building. Literally. Fun may involve doing a lot of different things. But once again: fun has to be work, to some degree. No one wants an "I win" button.
My Opinion of the Change from Sims 2 to 3 Categorically
The Good
* Improved stability. This game loads faster for me and has fewer overall loading screens than the base Sims 2. It is friendly with ALT-TAB, and hasn't crashed yet.
* Powerful recoloring and retexturing tools. Every object has had multiple sides and planes tagged as changeable, so that, for example, an interior door may be wooden at the hall side, and painted white on the bedroom side.
* Town visits are much easier and more alluring. It takes a few sim-minutes to get into town, there are reasons to go, it takes about as long as a trip to the bathroom, and the game time doesn't sear cracks in space-time as a result. Town time is synchronous with game time. Not to mention the beloved absence of loading screens.
* Dynamic town. Outward zooming shows neighbor homes with full detail. Following your character allows you to see their vehicle.
* Better featural design controls at character creation. A lot of people are expounding the woes of Sims looking too similar. I have to disagree with this. It is my personal belief that it's just difficult for many people to pull a slider in an "uglier" direction. I love creating imperfect people though, and believe the range looks sufficiently varied and beautiful.
* A minor graphical advancement. Not exactly setting the benchmarks for 2009, but at least my trees cast anti-aliased shadows.
* Many core and beloved features are left alone. A build mode exists, a buy mode exists. This is cited as a negative, too.
* The "move wall" tool actually works.
* Some necessities from the expansions have been included. From almost every expansion, in fact; as you have the young adult phase, cars, the cellphone, party provisions, gardening and fishing, and the ability to host a party.
* Increased skills count to 10. 11 with "Collecting".
* Nice skill journal with challenges.
* Trait system provides very different attitudes, obsessions, interactions, vulnerabities, resistances, vagaries of life. Certain trait combinations seem to have been prepared for, also.
* Encouragement of the limited lifespan (replay value). The trait system assists with varying the characters, the skill range assures that a "normal aging" setting will not allow masters-of-all-trades, the career meter seems timed for a normal lifespan for one full promotion tree, and your friends die. I'd guess one would feel a bit "abominationey" if they're notified that their grandson's best friend is about to die (of a geriatric cardiac disorder?) while stuffing themselves with ambrosia and pounding away at the treadmill.
* Slightly more to consider while at work. You can select to work hard, or actually build back fun and social meters by choosing lazier options. Workplace advancement is also more sophisticated; rather than chucking skill set requirements at you, you have projects, homework, a range of acceptable skill levels, and schmoozing potential. Despite this, promotions are not as randomized as in Sims 1 or 2. You get a progress bar, and when it is filled, you advance to the next job title.
The Bad (With Solutions Where Possible)
"Worse-Than-Expected"
* Online exchange. The big problem here is that it's no longer limited to new mesh/texture creations. Users are flooding the site with recolors that anyone can do with the existing swatches. It makes me wonder how buried fanmade, new-mesh objects will be when finally uploaded. Solution: Categorize.
* EA Store - It is seen as generally unethical to have a game slim on object content and then to sell off 60 or so objects in your store. People get less offended when these come in large expansions, which themselves alter gameplay. But that would be far too difficult, wouldn't it? Solution: Maxis did the clever thing. Even if they were withholding content, they slammed it into the expansion packs, and fewer complained. I'll buy an upgrade, but I won't buy a door. This isn't Neopets.
* Terrible game interface. I can't even count the number of people asking how the heck to switch families, save in more than one file, why there are "two" inventories, or how to even access the family one. It takes a lot of talent, though to screw up something so bad after hardly touching it.
* Story mode doesnt work. Reports are coming back of how story progression cannot be shut down, and how the generation of new children is quite random throughout the neighborhood. Also worth considering: the "dynamic" hood has very little power to build strong relationships between NPCs. So new families do not arise from extant marriages, everyone is an acquaintance to everyone else, and you are responsible for everything once again. It may a lack of attention in the programming, or laziness, or hope and prayer that no one would notice, but it is very clear that EA lied about the dynamics.
* File->Edit->Go to work. There are no career interiors. Job progression is still boring. Solution: Design the interiors and lay out tasks and time limits per day. Performance can vary finely with player cleverness and activity. The tasks required would be very specific to the job. A "Journalism Track" employee might race to town square, chasing down a story about a protest rally. A "chef" could have a very zoomed up view of the kitchen's surfaces, with all the ingredients and utensils laid out for the player. Mouse strokes could cut veggies and meats and then careful attention to cooking temperature would be necessary. If this sounds like a lot of implementation, this is nothing more than a flash game with easy programming. Many of those have been addictive enough to sell advertising space, haven't they? Please note that attending a workday would be optional, with the alternative being the drop-down menu as before. To solve the problem of players needing to watch multiple characters (and not disappear for hours to monitor the working sim), they could run the workday on its own time, and have the house time freeze. Once the player finishes a Sim workday, they are returned to the hour they left, to take care of the rest of the family. The working Sim will remain at their job until the assigned hour of departure, under the heading "At work: Player-driven" with no other drop-down options selectable. The player will meanwhile replay those hours for the rest of the family.
* Other rabbit-holes. Stores, the spa, and other unique town buildings can't be entered or constructed. This is particularly bad because the promotional scenes showed uniqueness on these buildings which, to the builders, drove up the hype for the game; as if they would actually touch and expand build mode. If the Sim enters a store, you get a list box and choose items to buy. If the sim enters a to pursue an activity, you are shown a progress bar. Progress bars are for windows installations, not high-priced games. This setup arises partially because the construction variables are non-existent with the building statics, unlike the "creatable" buildings, and because Sims in previous games frequently hemorrhaged hours away in stores and restaurants. Not to mention, they didn't want to create different objects for different KINDS of supermarket displays or book racks. Laziness. There is an easy solution to this. Draw the interiors as statics with collision geometry, and freeze time while purchases are made. Or (should I even say it): the town buildings should be creatable piecemeal, with the pre-existence of different consumer objects, stands and services, so the town shops wouldn't need to be instanced or internally hidden. Also, one of the things people like about Grand Theft Auto IV, is the fact that if you go to see a musical act, you really watch it and maybe enjoy it. Why couldn't the Sims do this? EA has more fundage than Rockstar. They fail to meet expectations again.
* Build mode capabilities remain unimproved. You still can't attach a garage to foundation because of the roof calculations. You still can't adjust the height of anything on a wall. Stairs within one tile of a doorway are still unplaceable and/or unusable. Curved walls remain impossible. Foundation levels are limited to two. Home levels are limited to five. Basements are still a challenge. Solutions: Massively better programming. "Click-and-drag" design-it-yourself windows. (NPC's don't use them anyway.) A rounded wall-edge option. I have seen home and design applications that allow you to shift height. Being a homeowner in a lame MMORPG allows you to adjust height of displayed objects, in fact. See further suggestions below.
* Sub-par writing. Descriptiveness, color, style, and accuracy are all off. The in-game text sounds like a teen's attempt to sound bright without having a clue about the quality or correctness of the presentation. Here is an example. "The teleportation pad reduces your transportation cost by 100% ... within a reasonable margin of error." I guess we have to closely monitor our savings from now on, because we may only enjoy a price reduction of 99 percent on a bad day ... which of course is still zero because there's no gas in the game, and you'd still pay bills on a previously purchased car. They obviously mean that there is a chance event of something going wrong with the teleporter. The writing is just incorrect. It's similarly flawed, lazy, or boring elsewhere.
* Default lifespans are still too fast. I am aware of the ability to adjust lifespan length. But some people aren't. I wanted to play the normal setting so as to feel as if I wasn't cheating, and around 3 days after my boy reached child phase, I got warnings about another birthday. My kid's done homework 3 times. If he was born on a weekend, he would have hardly ever gone to school! Come on. It's like they're trying to hustle you through a line at the supermarket. Normal lifespans are also too short to enjoy career mastery and have a side hobby. Solution: Allow players to feel "normal" with doubled lifespans, and don't make "child" the same length as "toddler".
* Social interactions are idiocy. The options have expanded, and their animations/responses look entirely too similar. "Speech bubbles" contain graphics that are far fewer in number than other Sim Games, unless they reference a specific household object under the heading "brag about possessions." On the whole, it is also very hard to fail a social encounter. Creating opposite personalities does not provide a challenge to acquiring friendship. Unlike in previous games, unfavored topic choices do not turn out negative social growth. Mostly, because no sim has favorite topics anymore. The attraction system is gone, the interests are gone, and the sense of it all is gone. Solution: full re-implementation of the Sims 2 system, and modify its base for this sequel. Allow more specific questions, social bonuses for favored topics, announcement of the discovery of favored topics, a much larger expandable stat sheet for all NPC sims with these data, allow trading of advice (correct bait to use, etc.), and new gameplay options provided by certain tracks of questioning (maybe you'd meet a brilliant naturalist who takes you to a hidden garden after the correct cues).
* Trait issues. Mean characters can still access the "friendly" social submenu. Geniuses do not start with grade bonuses in school, and only acquire logic skill faster. Sense of humor gives nothing more than a few conversation options. The majority of traits exist to speed up a progress bar. Shallow. Solution: saturate the game with about 10x more usage for all traits, stick social and functional restrictions on some traits, and add more. Genius should be on an intellectual gradient (Retarded-Dumb-Bright-Genius).
* "Developed" traits: (RICH??) This is a half (or one-hundredth) implemented idea to stick developmental features of a character on top of their ingrained traits. Except, the only one they bothered to include was rich and your sim always seems to thrill at this discovery. I'm not really sure what this says about society in general, or the EA staff in particular, but I'm pretty sure this would sit easier with me if there were other "aftertraits" to go along with "rich", or if it were removed entirely. Solution: Finish this feature. "I have discovered that Geoffrey Landgraab is RICH!" Fine, then I want to also have discovered that he is "Skilled at Fishing", "Married", "A Good Parent", and "Decent" (which will mean that he has rarely chosen 'mean' conversation options). More depth needed
here.
* Skill changes half thought out. Creativity expanded to "Writing" "Painting" and "Guitar". First, this demands that a new skill must be added with each musical instrument. But then, they probably will. Second, why was logic not expanded? Left-brain/right-brain contrast seems the theme there. Logic could have stretched to "Science" and "Strategy". Solution: Revamp skills to make depth consistent.
* Skill progression uneven. Your character will turn over a level every two repairs in mechanical -- for quite a while up the ladder. Your character will also have to play/write/paint for many long hours before seeing a millimeter's movement on the skill bar after level 8. Solution: Balanced progress.
* Boring activities: Fishing/Gardening. After you know the bait, or the fertilizer, you are essentially setting the command to fish or garden, and letting your sim get to it. The animations do not vary much, and the success occurs almost immediately. Also, during fishing, you may find random objects by accident. These are frequently generic products, like "age-old bubblebath." Solution: Optionally, mini game it. There are plenty of addicting fishing sims out there, just throw control to the player if they choose. Also, make the random chance finds unique items only.
* Broken activities: Fishing/Gardening. A clever player will catch 12 deathfish in 4 hours. That's thousands of extra dollars a night. Too much. Money trees don't seem to die, and you can plant hundreds. The "common" plants die after very few harvest cycles, and the "rare" plants RARELY die. Finally, mounting fish results in receiving a plaque with a very tiny version of your catch. Solutions: Reduce deathfish yields to one per day. Make rare plants die faster. Punish excessive money tree harvesting with IRS/Treasury visit-and-fine. Make mounted fish closer in size to the actual fish.
* Death system. This has a few issues. First, you receive a phone call that someone is about to die. That's understandable enough. Then, like clockwork, the person will die a day later. There is no chance event, no dice roll, they are just guaranteed to go. More programming laziness. Finally, your sim avoids reacting to it altogether. The phone call is shrugged off, and the final death notification is obviously meant to bother YOU. Not the sim. Onto the next friend, as far as he is concerned. Actually, my sim received a phone call notifying of a death recently. He used the standard phone animations, which were left unchanged for the occasion, and sounded like agreement and laughing. Do developers do any work anymore?
* Unbalanced and annoying tutorial system. No really, it bothers you all the time. It rarely gives you info you don't know, and when you need it, it doesn't have an entry. Here's an example: I saw a very clear and baby-stepping article about the fact that four walls makes a room. I still have no clue what fertilizer to use for which plant, or where to find the books for that. Another half-finished feature. Solution: Redo entirely.
* The guitar music and animation. Is it just me, or do our sims only play easy listening? I realize there's no electric guitar (why not, again?), but I don't want to wait days for the skill meter to fill listening to hammy, douchey, college campusy, sandal-wearing selections. Also, the performing sim seems to Rock the Heck Out as if they're jamming Metallica. That doesn't work for this style of music at all. Solution: Change the music to rock or add more douchebaggery to the performer's attitude when playing.
* Paintings. First, there are too few in buy mode. Second, while you can paint scores of them with the easel, new problems have arisen. You cannot recolor/retex the frames if you wish to hang up your work, the brush-stroke effect is WAY to consumptive of still-life picture quality, and your smart sims will have a tendency to overuse the "honeycombing" look-from-a-distance" effect, making 80% of all paintings seem essentially the same. The game will hail these as brilliant, too. Solutions:Add more variations of intelligent work than the honeycomb, do less striations on still life, make frames designable for the paintings we keep, and provide more purchasable paintings in-game.
* Food is too simple. I want to see 5 ingredients for something like a "Stu Surprise" rather than just one. Also, it kills it for me that missing ingredients magically appear in the fridge (while your cash for the food is magically whisked away). The point of the stores should be to acquire groceries, not just cash in on a 5% discount of $4.00. Finally, child sims can have favorite foods that THEY HAVE NEVER TRIED. Major lack of foresight. Solution: Increase recipe accuracy, make condiments purchaseable and add a condiment rack. Do not create fridge food out of thin air. Dare I say it would be FUN to have to shape your meals around what kind of food you actually have available.
* Book reading process. Honestly, this just sucks. An intelligent character won't leave their bookcase alone. Sims going for a quick read will exhibit no preference for new stuff, or books already finished. Also, all bookcases purchased now come with some books. Solutions: Have characters exhibit preference for new books. Let the bookshelves be empty, and make us buy the books we wish to read!
* Cars. Endless issues here. The carpool doesn't go away after you purchase a car. With multiple cars in the household, your sim often does not travel in the one you clicked on. No animations exist for pulling the car out of the driveway, or into a parking space. Career reward cars do not announce their existence, and you cannot store them. Owned cars enjoy spending time in people's pockets. Not to mention, in this sophisticated AI world, no one is impressed by the type of car you have. Solutions: Just ... just the opposite of everything I wrote here.
* Toddlers that play with intellectual toys (xylophone/shape-blocks). They receive a progress bar, which when completed, may or may not add a skill. Users report varying results. In my own experience, I used the shape blocks quite a bit, the xylophone a little bit, and read three books. I only got credit for the last/most frequent thing done: the books, and it netted me one skill point to writing, and notified me two days later. Final note: Skills seem to be added when skill-building activity is attempted for the first time in a later life-stage. This could have been clearer by the game.
"Downgrades: New Gameplay Limitations"
* Diagonal and curved design tools have been removed from pool creation. The absence of the curved option I can marginally understand, but diagonal had been in the series for quite a while. This is a downgrade and should be easy to re-implement.
* Parent-toddler interactions weakened. Range of space required has increased to what appears to be 2x3, so toddlers or parents will often walk three rooms away to pursue any kind of contact. Worse yet, if the toddler has gone, the parent waits for the toddler to return to start the interaction, rather than going himself. [/B]Solution:[/B] Fix the interaction space to 2x1 and disallow long trips to "no-collision space".
* Ultra speed. This fourth and highest setting feels like mortal plodding as the player can still eye every bedtime movement of his sim, hear their every snore. There used to only be three grades of speed. The fastest, "ultra", should absolutely mean that you're moving at around fifteen minutes a second or so. Solution: Skip whatever frames are necessary to attain proper time compression.
* Motive bar functionality. Another important device of gameplay confounded by the interface. You need to click through this mess to see your needs. I think the game bills itself as clever enough to not have sims suffer if left to their own AI. 1. It's not. 2. What if you had them on low free-will. Solution:Fix the motive bar in place with abbreviations.
* The ceilings suck. No longer do ceilings appear everywhere without a staircase. Ceilings only appear when a floor above you exists. If roof is above your present floor, you will not get a ceiling. Also, you can't design them.
* AI annoyances. Sims are now capable of passing each other in a one tile space, but they typically don't. They appear confused for a moment, and proceed -- maybe. Sims with needs in the red do not attend them. The complain process still takes longer than the solutions. See parent-toddler interactions above.
* The cakes cannot be eaten.
* Babies, if satisfied, just lay listlessly in the crib. They do not touch the bars, crawl, explore, or turn over. Their life animations change only slightly when they cry.
* Regular plants. They couldn't figure out how to remove the collision problems when watering plants so they took out watering entirely. I just think this is totally weak.
* Chimneys now take up 6 tiles. Why? No .. no really.. why?
* No lot creation or deletion. This is a major problem. What did I say in the beginning? Control. This is a perfect example of a cut feature to reduce programming variables. Solution: Developers who care.
* Television shows, movies, video games, are too few in number. You will now run into repeat video on each channel in under a minute. No matter what the gender or intelligence of your Sim, EA Sports is more likely to load when "playing computer games" than anything else, and it is a retarded football title of theirs that no one buys. There is another forgettable video game animation, and that's it.
* Staircases. The code for staircases has always been the bane of a Sims programmer. We all know how hard it is to get characters to walk in a straight line, after all. But why can't we recolor these? There are only 8, and they are horrible bases. The woods don't match anything, four of them are intended for the outdoors or ultramodern house, and one of them is a carpeted variety. Its color is gray-green. They also suffer from earlier construction limitations: You can't taper them, you can't curve the banister. The width tool is effectively useless. Solution: Make them recolorable and curvable. Not that I know how to do this at all. But why don't they?
* Memories removed. Any awesome or tragic event in your Sim life should be attended with photographic vigilance, because you will never see or hear about it again. Not to mention, you have no ongoing record of divorces, aging up well, etc. Solution: More depth; memories should be brought back, and creep into the fears and desires from time to time. The loss of a baby boy might make a parent wish to have a girl, when they are finally ready. A series of fast promotions should create a negative moodlet if the next promotion isn't reached expeditiously. That is depth. 7-day moodlets are not.
Curtains. They cannot be set to close, open, or auto. Garage doors CAN be triggered, though -- for those of us that wanted that. So if you have the fuller sort of curtains in a room, expect to not be able to see the outside. Solution: Next time EA designers have a major project to work on, give them a checklist of things to think about. Does the object look nice? How could it function? Does it match objects that it is commonly used with?
"Serious Object Omissions"
* Functional doors. The extant doors are grand, weird, or modern. But missing are the two most common doors I've seen in real life: 1. Interior doors without paneling; 2. Front doors with a medium-sized (not door-length) window. Also the french doors, an unbelievably useful staple for the wealthy since the Sims 1 are now gone. They were also easily and convincingly placeable as double doors.
* The piano. In some parts of the world, a piano is likely to be found in the majority of middle class homes. A guitar is less frequently seen. I would much prefer tried and true methods to return and for the base game to have started with a nice, room-swallowing piano.
* Two story columns. These were in the base Sims 2.
* The diving board.
* The usual range of functional furniture. I'm now convinced that none of the designers have ever seen a wealthy person's dining table (they are typically not glass).
* There are curved flowerbeds and no curved fences or dividers.
Other Gameplay Improvement Suggestions
* Increase the lifetime reward list to 50x its present size. The catch: only allow a small fraction of the new list to be accessed by any one character over their life. This grants replayability, because you'll never know which lifetime rewards you can potentially have access to. Those exposed to you will be determined by your personality at start-up, and your play style throughout.
* As indicated above, turn the Sims' activities into games for the player; bustling with strategy, reasoning, and action. Let the musician's workplace summon a guitar hero interface for the player. The dishwasher job should have a timed get-em-clean mode. Writers should go through grammar/style correction challenges and appear on Oprah. But most importantly: let it all be optional in case the player wants the Sim to do the work. Neopets is soon going to total a billion dollars off of minigames like this, games which also support the virtual affluence of an avatar. And their simulated character life -- well -- sucks compared to the Sims. So why should the sim activities be the ones which are observation without participation?
* Individualize free-will settings per family member.
* Trainable and lockable activity sequences. EAT->TOILET->BATH->WORK. Who doesn't follow that pattern 99% of the time? I'd rather not click through that crap anymore .. and for that matter...
* Assignable beds, sides, doors (these previously existed), chairs, dining surfaces, etc., etc.
* Population Settings. New aging setting: Age everything except not past adulthood/young adulthood and add a "no deaths" checkbox. Require player
approval for townies to move away--or at least call attention to it and allow the player to convince them not to leave.
* Build mode. I want to see sloped ceilings, window height adjustment, curveature possible everywhere, height-expandable levels, designable build mode objects, sculptable roofing with sectional slope differentiation, and the ability to vault over fences.
* Drawable area for guests during a party. I hate having them out of reach and all over the house.
* Add a neighborhood builder. Lot sizing should be "click and drag."
* Recipe creation: Select your own animations and food products.
* Full integration with Sim City 4 (or 5 ... lol)
* Most of all, stop porting 95% of what had already existed in previous games and instead, putting on a new coat of gloss (more specifically, a nice graphical outline of a house), and feeling these are justifiably big enough changes to make a sequel (with which our old expansions will not work). Work with the code, or write new code, but try not to merely change the ergonomics and claim you made technological leaps in the process.
Game developers should definitely fix the too-often whined about issues, but more importantly they should expand the game beyond the imagination of the community. They should consider the range of options within gameplay, but also (for the 100th time) the depth of each feature; what it does, how the game is significantly changed by your interplay with it, and what sort of reward it carries. This game feels like it skirted about a hundred fronts, coughed up 80% of what was needed for some, 10% for others, and completed very little. The community, I believe, will start to feel that sour sort of "gamer's guilt" that occurs when you realize you wasted valuable time on a title that didn't give you much of an excuse, and wrongly thought it was awesome. At least with a game like X-com, you can look back 20 years later and have an excuse for your wasted childhood.
---
-dies-
anyway, here is a gameplay video that I made: [link]
what can I say? I was booooooored.
Alllllll for now!
Anywho, here is my review of TS3. It is long, so bear with me.
Review:
The Sims gives you little people that you can design. It sets up a virtual, customizable life. Probably, your little person looks like you. You build your people homes, choose their furniture, buy them better TV's when the cash flows, watch them go to work, strategize their romances, educate their children, and lament their deaths. The Sims is a cut above other virtual life games for two simple reasons: control and complexity. Here is an example and a simple truth: It is more fun to spend money making your home ten feet wider; decorating every inch, than it is to level up into upper middle class and have a better house materialize before you (as with Sim City). Control. Complexity. Secondarily: realism and ease. Very lastly: ergonomics. We go wow when we can make a fifth floor and an elevator. We do not go wow when a family inventory button is added to the buy menu.
Why is this game fun? Fun is a sense of progress related to applied skill. YOUR skill. If a big red button appeared with the text "Win Game" and all you had to do was push it, that wouldn't be too awesome, would it? Fifty thousand years ago we were spearing mammoth and splitting stone. Today, hustling to press a stack of papers into your boss's paws typifies the real-world dynamic of progress. There is no sense of it, because there is no end in sight. With the Sims, promotions are possible, romances can be with anyone, and your home can be whatever you want it to be. The horizon is visible, and its breadth depends observably on your efforts. Fun is work; it's just work that involves all of you, as a person, and it is work that has rewards in sight. With many options and reasonable rewards, the Sims lulls you to work your happy little butt off.
A sequel to such a franchise needs to challenge and subvert the original limitations. It needs to offer more options, better control, increased flexibility, improved realism, and if there's time: make it easier to use. But ease is really the least of all considerations. EA made that mistake with Spore.
We expected a sequel. We expected advances, amelioration, aesthetics, and many other A-words often emergent on the SAT. But now we're eyeing the gunfire back from the community, members of which reported their disgust with this new incarnation. They were quick to note the evaporation of Maxis over the corporate burners of EA, a company for whom public appraisal often reserves just one very special A-word.
So IS The Sims 3 a fitting sequel (or was it a prequel) ? Did they fail? Is this a creative vision, or a "duct-tape it and pass it down the assembly line" product, fit for today's marketplace? Well, it's both. It has the range, but not the depth. It has surface variety on its structure, but you can't go inside the
building. Literally. Fun may involve doing a lot of different things. But once again: fun has to be work, to some degree. No one wants an "I win" button.
My Opinion of the Change from Sims 2 to 3 Categorically
The Good
* Improved stability. This game loads faster for me and has fewer overall loading screens than the base Sims 2. It is friendly with ALT-TAB, and hasn't crashed yet.
* Powerful recoloring and retexturing tools. Every object has had multiple sides and planes tagged as changeable, so that, for example, an interior door may be wooden at the hall side, and painted white on the bedroom side.
* Town visits are much easier and more alluring. It takes a few sim-minutes to get into town, there are reasons to go, it takes about as long as a trip to the bathroom, and the game time doesn't sear cracks in space-time as a result. Town time is synchronous with game time. Not to mention the beloved absence of loading screens.
* Dynamic town. Outward zooming shows neighbor homes with full detail. Following your character allows you to see their vehicle.
* Better featural design controls at character creation. A lot of people are expounding the woes of Sims looking too similar. I have to disagree with this. It is my personal belief that it's just difficult for many people to pull a slider in an "uglier" direction. I love creating imperfect people though, and believe the range looks sufficiently varied and beautiful.
* A minor graphical advancement. Not exactly setting the benchmarks for 2009, but at least my trees cast anti-aliased shadows.
* Many core and beloved features are left alone. A build mode exists, a buy mode exists. This is cited as a negative, too.
* The "move wall" tool actually works.
* Some necessities from the expansions have been included. From almost every expansion, in fact; as you have the young adult phase, cars, the cellphone, party provisions, gardening and fishing, and the ability to host a party.
* Increased skills count to 10. 11 with "Collecting".
* Nice skill journal with challenges.
* Trait system provides very different attitudes, obsessions, interactions, vulnerabities, resistances, vagaries of life. Certain trait combinations seem to have been prepared for, also.
* Encouragement of the limited lifespan (replay value). The trait system assists with varying the characters, the skill range assures that a "normal aging" setting will not allow masters-of-all-trades, the career meter seems timed for a normal lifespan for one full promotion tree, and your friends die. I'd guess one would feel a bit "abominationey" if they're notified that their grandson's best friend is about to die (of a geriatric cardiac disorder?) while stuffing themselves with ambrosia and pounding away at the treadmill.
* Slightly more to consider while at work. You can select to work hard, or actually build back fun and social meters by choosing lazier options. Workplace advancement is also more sophisticated; rather than chucking skill set requirements at you, you have projects, homework, a range of acceptable skill levels, and schmoozing potential. Despite this, promotions are not as randomized as in Sims 1 or 2. You get a progress bar, and when it is filled, you advance to the next job title.
The Bad (With Solutions Where Possible)
"Worse-Than-Expected"
* Online exchange. The big problem here is that it's no longer limited to new mesh/texture creations. Users are flooding the site with recolors that anyone can do with the existing swatches. It makes me wonder how buried fanmade, new-mesh objects will be when finally uploaded. Solution: Categorize.
* EA Store - It is seen as generally unethical to have a game slim on object content and then to sell off 60 or so objects in your store. People get less offended when these come in large expansions, which themselves alter gameplay. But that would be far too difficult, wouldn't it? Solution: Maxis did the clever thing. Even if they were withholding content, they slammed it into the expansion packs, and fewer complained. I'll buy an upgrade, but I won't buy a door. This isn't Neopets.
* Terrible game interface. I can't even count the number of people asking how the heck to switch families, save in more than one file, why there are "two" inventories, or how to even access the family one. It takes a lot of talent, though to screw up something so bad after hardly touching it.
* Story mode doesnt work. Reports are coming back of how story progression cannot be shut down, and how the generation of new children is quite random throughout the neighborhood. Also worth considering: the "dynamic" hood has very little power to build strong relationships between NPCs. So new families do not arise from extant marriages, everyone is an acquaintance to everyone else, and you are responsible for everything once again. It may a lack of attention in the programming, or laziness, or hope and prayer that no one would notice, but it is very clear that EA lied about the dynamics.
* File->Edit->Go to work. There are no career interiors. Job progression is still boring. Solution: Design the interiors and lay out tasks and time limits per day. Performance can vary finely with player cleverness and activity. The tasks required would be very specific to the job. A "Journalism Track" employee might race to town square, chasing down a story about a protest rally. A "chef" could have a very zoomed up view of the kitchen's surfaces, with all the ingredients and utensils laid out for the player. Mouse strokes could cut veggies and meats and then careful attention to cooking temperature would be necessary. If this sounds like a lot of implementation, this is nothing more than a flash game with easy programming. Many of those have been addictive enough to sell advertising space, haven't they? Please note that attending a workday would be optional, with the alternative being the drop-down menu as before. To solve the problem of players needing to watch multiple characters (and not disappear for hours to monitor the working sim), they could run the workday on its own time, and have the house time freeze. Once the player finishes a Sim workday, they are returned to the hour they left, to take care of the rest of the family. The working Sim will remain at their job until the assigned hour of departure, under the heading "At work: Player-driven" with no other drop-down options selectable. The player will meanwhile replay those hours for the rest of the family.
* Other rabbit-holes. Stores, the spa, and other unique town buildings can't be entered or constructed. This is particularly bad because the promotional scenes showed uniqueness on these buildings which, to the builders, drove up the hype for the game; as if they would actually touch and expand build mode. If the Sim enters a store, you get a list box and choose items to buy. If the sim enters a to pursue an activity, you are shown a progress bar. Progress bars are for windows installations, not high-priced games. This setup arises partially because the construction variables are non-existent with the building statics, unlike the "creatable" buildings, and because Sims in previous games frequently hemorrhaged hours away in stores and restaurants. Not to mention, they didn't want to create different objects for different KINDS of supermarket displays or book racks. Laziness. There is an easy solution to this. Draw the interiors as statics with collision geometry, and freeze time while purchases are made. Or (should I even say it): the town buildings should be creatable piecemeal, with the pre-existence of different consumer objects, stands and services, so the town shops wouldn't need to be instanced or internally hidden. Also, one of the things people like about Grand Theft Auto IV, is the fact that if you go to see a musical act, you really watch it and maybe enjoy it. Why couldn't the Sims do this? EA has more fundage than Rockstar. They fail to meet expectations again.
* Build mode capabilities remain unimproved. You still can't attach a garage to foundation because of the roof calculations. You still can't adjust the height of anything on a wall. Stairs within one tile of a doorway are still unplaceable and/or unusable. Curved walls remain impossible. Foundation levels are limited to two. Home levels are limited to five. Basements are still a challenge. Solutions: Massively better programming. "Click-and-drag" design-it-yourself windows. (NPC's don't use them anyway.) A rounded wall-edge option. I have seen home and design applications that allow you to shift height. Being a homeowner in a lame MMORPG allows you to adjust height of displayed objects, in fact. See further suggestions below.
* Sub-par writing. Descriptiveness, color, style, and accuracy are all off. The in-game text sounds like a teen's attempt to sound bright without having a clue about the quality or correctness of the presentation. Here is an example. "The teleportation pad reduces your transportation cost by 100% ... within a reasonable margin of error." I guess we have to closely monitor our savings from now on, because we may only enjoy a price reduction of 99 percent on a bad day ... which of course is still zero because there's no gas in the game, and you'd still pay bills on a previously purchased car. They obviously mean that there is a chance event of something going wrong with the teleporter. The writing is just incorrect. It's similarly flawed, lazy, or boring elsewhere.
* Default lifespans are still too fast. I am aware of the ability to adjust lifespan length. But some people aren't. I wanted to play the normal setting so as to feel as if I wasn't cheating, and around 3 days after my boy reached child phase, I got warnings about another birthday. My kid's done homework 3 times. If he was born on a weekend, he would have hardly ever gone to school! Come on. It's like they're trying to hustle you through a line at the supermarket. Normal lifespans are also too short to enjoy career mastery and have a side hobby. Solution: Allow players to feel "normal" with doubled lifespans, and don't make "child" the same length as "toddler".
* Social interactions are idiocy. The options have expanded, and their animations/responses look entirely too similar. "Speech bubbles" contain graphics that are far fewer in number than other Sim Games, unless they reference a specific household object under the heading "brag about possessions." On the whole, it is also very hard to fail a social encounter. Creating opposite personalities does not provide a challenge to acquiring friendship. Unlike in previous games, unfavored topic choices do not turn out negative social growth. Mostly, because no sim has favorite topics anymore. The attraction system is gone, the interests are gone, and the sense of it all is gone. Solution: full re-implementation of the Sims 2 system, and modify its base for this sequel. Allow more specific questions, social bonuses for favored topics, announcement of the discovery of favored topics, a much larger expandable stat sheet for all NPC sims with these data, allow trading of advice (correct bait to use, etc.), and new gameplay options provided by certain tracks of questioning (maybe you'd meet a brilliant naturalist who takes you to a hidden garden after the correct cues).
* Trait issues. Mean characters can still access the "friendly" social submenu. Geniuses do not start with grade bonuses in school, and only acquire logic skill faster. Sense of humor gives nothing more than a few conversation options. The majority of traits exist to speed up a progress bar. Shallow. Solution: saturate the game with about 10x more usage for all traits, stick social and functional restrictions on some traits, and add more. Genius should be on an intellectual gradient (Retarded-Dumb-Bright-Genius).
* "Developed" traits: (RICH??) This is a half (or one-hundredth) implemented idea to stick developmental features of a character on top of their ingrained traits. Except, the only one they bothered to include was rich and your sim always seems to thrill at this discovery. I'm not really sure what this says about society in general, or the EA staff in particular, but I'm pretty sure this would sit easier with me if there were other "aftertraits" to go along with "rich", or if it were removed entirely. Solution: Finish this feature. "I have discovered that Geoffrey Landgraab is RICH!" Fine, then I want to also have discovered that he is "Skilled at Fishing", "Married", "A Good Parent", and "Decent" (which will mean that he has rarely chosen 'mean' conversation options). More depth needed
here.
* Skill changes half thought out. Creativity expanded to "Writing" "Painting" and "Guitar". First, this demands that a new skill must be added with each musical instrument. But then, they probably will. Second, why was logic not expanded? Left-brain/right-brain contrast seems the theme there. Logic could have stretched to "Science" and "Strategy". Solution: Revamp skills to make depth consistent.
* Skill progression uneven. Your character will turn over a level every two repairs in mechanical -- for quite a while up the ladder. Your character will also have to play/write/paint for many long hours before seeing a millimeter's movement on the skill bar after level 8. Solution: Balanced progress.
* Boring activities: Fishing/Gardening. After you know the bait, or the fertilizer, you are essentially setting the command to fish or garden, and letting your sim get to it. The animations do not vary much, and the success occurs almost immediately. Also, during fishing, you may find random objects by accident. These are frequently generic products, like "age-old bubblebath." Solution: Optionally, mini game it. There are plenty of addicting fishing sims out there, just throw control to the player if they choose. Also, make the random chance finds unique items only.
* Broken activities: Fishing/Gardening. A clever player will catch 12 deathfish in 4 hours. That's thousands of extra dollars a night. Too much. Money trees don't seem to die, and you can plant hundreds. The "common" plants die after very few harvest cycles, and the "rare" plants RARELY die. Finally, mounting fish results in receiving a plaque with a very tiny version of your catch. Solutions: Reduce deathfish yields to one per day. Make rare plants die faster. Punish excessive money tree harvesting with IRS/Treasury visit-and-fine. Make mounted fish closer in size to the actual fish.
* Death system. This has a few issues. First, you receive a phone call that someone is about to die. That's understandable enough. Then, like clockwork, the person will die a day later. There is no chance event, no dice roll, they are just guaranteed to go. More programming laziness. Finally, your sim avoids reacting to it altogether. The phone call is shrugged off, and the final death notification is obviously meant to bother YOU. Not the sim. Onto the next friend, as far as he is concerned. Actually, my sim received a phone call notifying of a death recently. He used the standard phone animations, which were left unchanged for the occasion, and sounded like agreement and laughing. Do developers do any work anymore?
* Unbalanced and annoying tutorial system. No really, it bothers you all the time. It rarely gives you info you don't know, and when you need it, it doesn't have an entry. Here's an example: I saw a very clear and baby-stepping article about the fact that four walls makes a room. I still have no clue what fertilizer to use for which plant, or where to find the books for that. Another half-finished feature. Solution: Redo entirely.
* The guitar music and animation. Is it just me, or do our sims only play easy listening? I realize there's no electric guitar (why not, again?), but I don't want to wait days for the skill meter to fill listening to hammy, douchey, college campusy, sandal-wearing selections. Also, the performing sim seems to Rock the Heck Out as if they're jamming Metallica. That doesn't work for this style of music at all. Solution: Change the music to rock or add more douchebaggery to the performer's attitude when playing.
* Paintings. First, there are too few in buy mode. Second, while you can paint scores of them with the easel, new problems have arisen. You cannot recolor/retex the frames if you wish to hang up your work, the brush-stroke effect is WAY to consumptive of still-life picture quality, and your smart sims will have a tendency to overuse the "honeycombing" look-from-a-distance" effect, making 80% of all paintings seem essentially the same. The game will hail these as brilliant, too. Solutions:Add more variations of intelligent work than the honeycomb, do less striations on still life, make frames designable for the paintings we keep, and provide more purchasable paintings in-game.
* Food is too simple. I want to see 5 ingredients for something like a "Stu Surprise" rather than just one. Also, it kills it for me that missing ingredients magically appear in the fridge (while your cash for the food is magically whisked away). The point of the stores should be to acquire groceries, not just cash in on a 5% discount of $4.00. Finally, child sims can have favorite foods that THEY HAVE NEVER TRIED. Major lack of foresight. Solution: Increase recipe accuracy, make condiments purchaseable and add a condiment rack. Do not create fridge food out of thin air. Dare I say it would be FUN to have to shape your meals around what kind of food you actually have available.
* Book reading process. Honestly, this just sucks. An intelligent character won't leave their bookcase alone. Sims going for a quick read will exhibit no preference for new stuff, or books already finished. Also, all bookcases purchased now come with some books. Solutions: Have characters exhibit preference for new books. Let the bookshelves be empty, and make us buy the books we wish to read!
* Cars. Endless issues here. The carpool doesn't go away after you purchase a car. With multiple cars in the household, your sim often does not travel in the one you clicked on. No animations exist for pulling the car out of the driveway, or into a parking space. Career reward cars do not announce their existence, and you cannot store them. Owned cars enjoy spending time in people's pockets. Not to mention, in this sophisticated AI world, no one is impressed by the type of car you have. Solutions: Just ... just the opposite of everything I wrote here.
* Toddlers that play with intellectual toys (xylophone/shape-blocks). They receive a progress bar, which when completed, may or may not add a skill. Users report varying results. In my own experience, I used the shape blocks quite a bit, the xylophone a little bit, and read three books. I only got credit for the last/most frequent thing done: the books, and it netted me one skill point to writing, and notified me two days later. Final note: Skills seem to be added when skill-building activity is attempted for the first time in a later life-stage. This could have been clearer by the game.
"Downgrades: New Gameplay Limitations"
* Diagonal and curved design tools have been removed from pool creation. The absence of the curved option I can marginally understand, but diagonal had been in the series for quite a while. This is a downgrade and should be easy to re-implement.
* Parent-toddler interactions weakened. Range of space required has increased to what appears to be 2x3, so toddlers or parents will often walk three rooms away to pursue any kind of contact. Worse yet, if the toddler has gone, the parent waits for the toddler to return to start the interaction, rather than going himself. [/B]Solution:[/B] Fix the interaction space to 2x1 and disallow long trips to "no-collision space".
* Ultra speed. This fourth and highest setting feels like mortal plodding as the player can still eye every bedtime movement of his sim, hear their every snore. There used to only be three grades of speed. The fastest, "ultra", should absolutely mean that you're moving at around fifteen minutes a second or so. Solution: Skip whatever frames are necessary to attain proper time compression.
* Motive bar functionality. Another important device of gameplay confounded by the interface. You need to click through this mess to see your needs. I think the game bills itself as clever enough to not have sims suffer if left to their own AI. 1. It's not. 2. What if you had them on low free-will. Solution:Fix the motive bar in place with abbreviations.
* The ceilings suck. No longer do ceilings appear everywhere without a staircase. Ceilings only appear when a floor above you exists. If roof is above your present floor, you will not get a ceiling. Also, you can't design them.
* AI annoyances. Sims are now capable of passing each other in a one tile space, but they typically don't. They appear confused for a moment, and proceed -- maybe. Sims with needs in the red do not attend them. The complain process still takes longer than the solutions. See parent-toddler interactions above.
* The cakes cannot be eaten.
* Babies, if satisfied, just lay listlessly in the crib. They do not touch the bars, crawl, explore, or turn over. Their life animations change only slightly when they cry.
* Regular plants. They couldn't figure out how to remove the collision problems when watering plants so they took out watering entirely. I just think this is totally weak.
* Chimneys now take up 6 tiles. Why? No .. no really.. why?
* No lot creation or deletion. This is a major problem. What did I say in the beginning? Control. This is a perfect example of a cut feature to reduce programming variables. Solution: Developers who care.
* Television shows, movies, video games, are too few in number. You will now run into repeat video on each channel in under a minute. No matter what the gender or intelligence of your Sim, EA Sports is more likely to load when "playing computer games" than anything else, and it is a retarded football title of theirs that no one buys. There is another forgettable video game animation, and that's it.
* Staircases. The code for staircases has always been the bane of a Sims programmer. We all know how hard it is to get characters to walk in a straight line, after all. But why can't we recolor these? There are only 8, and they are horrible bases. The woods don't match anything, four of them are intended for the outdoors or ultramodern house, and one of them is a carpeted variety. Its color is gray-green. They also suffer from earlier construction limitations: You can't taper them, you can't curve the banister. The width tool is effectively useless. Solution: Make them recolorable and curvable. Not that I know how to do this at all. But why don't they?
* Memories removed. Any awesome or tragic event in your Sim life should be attended with photographic vigilance, because you will never see or hear about it again. Not to mention, you have no ongoing record of divorces, aging up well, etc. Solution: More depth; memories should be brought back, and creep into the fears and desires from time to time. The loss of a baby boy might make a parent wish to have a girl, when they are finally ready. A series of fast promotions should create a negative moodlet if the next promotion isn't reached expeditiously. That is depth. 7-day moodlets are not.
Curtains. They cannot be set to close, open, or auto. Garage doors CAN be triggered, though -- for those of us that wanted that. So if you have the fuller sort of curtains in a room, expect to not be able to see the outside. Solution: Next time EA designers have a major project to work on, give them a checklist of things to think about. Does the object look nice? How could it function? Does it match objects that it is commonly used with?
"Serious Object Omissions"
* Functional doors. The extant doors are grand, weird, or modern. But missing are the two most common doors I've seen in real life: 1. Interior doors without paneling; 2. Front doors with a medium-sized (not door-length) window. Also the french doors, an unbelievably useful staple for the wealthy since the Sims 1 are now gone. They were also easily and convincingly placeable as double doors.
* The piano. In some parts of the world, a piano is likely to be found in the majority of middle class homes. A guitar is less frequently seen. I would much prefer tried and true methods to return and for the base game to have started with a nice, room-swallowing piano.
* Two story columns. These were in the base Sims 2.
* The diving board.
* The usual range of functional furniture. I'm now convinced that none of the designers have ever seen a wealthy person's dining table (they are typically not glass).
* There are curved flowerbeds and no curved fences or dividers.
Other Gameplay Improvement Suggestions
* Increase the lifetime reward list to 50x its present size. The catch: only allow a small fraction of the new list to be accessed by any one character over their life. This grants replayability, because you'll never know which lifetime rewards you can potentially have access to. Those exposed to you will be determined by your personality at start-up, and your play style throughout.
* As indicated above, turn the Sims' activities into games for the player; bustling with strategy, reasoning, and action. Let the musician's workplace summon a guitar hero interface for the player. The dishwasher job should have a timed get-em-clean mode. Writers should go through grammar/style correction challenges and appear on Oprah. But most importantly: let it all be optional in case the player wants the Sim to do the work. Neopets is soon going to total a billion dollars off of minigames like this, games which also support the virtual affluence of an avatar. And their simulated character life -- well -- sucks compared to the Sims. So why should the sim activities be the ones which are observation without participation?
* Individualize free-will settings per family member.
* Trainable and lockable activity sequences. EAT->TOILET->BATH->WORK. Who doesn't follow that pattern 99% of the time? I'd rather not click through that crap anymore .. and for that matter...
* Assignable beds, sides, doors (these previously existed), chairs, dining surfaces, etc., etc.
* Population Settings. New aging setting: Age everything except not past adulthood/young adulthood and add a "no deaths" checkbox. Require player
approval for townies to move away--or at least call attention to it and allow the player to convince them not to leave.
* Build mode. I want to see sloped ceilings, window height adjustment, curveature possible everywhere, height-expandable levels, designable build mode objects, sculptable roofing with sectional slope differentiation, and the ability to vault over fences.
* Drawable area for guests during a party. I hate having them out of reach and all over the house.
* Add a neighborhood builder. Lot sizing should be "click and drag."
* Recipe creation: Select your own animations and food products.
* Full integration with Sim City 4 (or 5 ... lol)
* Most of all, stop porting 95% of what had already existed in previous games and instead, putting on a new coat of gloss (more specifically, a nice graphical outline of a house), and feeling these are justifiably big enough changes to make a sequel (with which our old expansions will not work). Work with the code, or write new code, but try not to merely change the ergonomics and claim you made technological leaps in the process.
Game developers should definitely fix the too-often whined about issues, but more importantly they should expand the game beyond the imagination of the community. They should consider the range of options within gameplay, but also (for the 100th time) the depth of each feature; what it does, how the game is significantly changed by your interplay with it, and what sort of reward it carries. This game feels like it skirted about a hundred fronts, coughed up 80% of what was needed for some, 10% for others, and completed very little. The community, I believe, will start to feel that sour sort of "gamer's guilt" that occurs when you realize you wasted valuable time on a title that didn't give you much of an excuse, and wrongly thought it was awesome. At least with a game like X-com, you can look back 20 years later and have an excuse for your wasted childhood.
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-dies-
anyway, here is a gameplay video that I made: [link]
what can I say? I was booooooored.
Alllllll for now!